The Musings Of Jeff Chandler

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A post published by John P. over on the Woopra blog is stating that Woopra will be shutting down beta registrations once they reach 50,000 monitored websites. As of October 8th, Woopra was monitoring 45,000 websites. Once registration is closed, there is a possibility that the media will blow in response but John gives a series of explanations as to the reasoning behind the move.

A 50,000 site “beta” is certainly a big enough sample to work through bugs and take suggestions.

We have a number of projects underway that we need to turn our attentions to temporarily and this will allow us to focus on core improvements as opposed to continual expansion.

We continue to hear from the community that you’d like more personalized attention, and pausing the site additions will ensure against further dilution of our current limited resources.

Once the Woopra team gets their ducks in a row, they will replace their site approval system with a personal invitation system in which current Woopra users will be able to send invitations to friends and family. Woopra was unofficially announced back at WordCamp Dallas about six months ago and since then, the sky has been the limit for the amount of success and growth that Woopra has experienced. Keep it up John!

Ever wonder why there is so many people around you with the same name? I do. Thanks to NameTrends.net, I discovered that my first name “Jeffrey” was a name given to many baby males during the time frame of 1945-1993 with peaks in 1961 and 1968. I was born in 1983. That is quite a lot of Jeffrey’s.

NameTrends sources its data from the social security records which are publicly available and contains the national popularity of each of the top 1000 male and female names for each year since 1880. It also contains state-specific popularity of the top 100 male and female names for each year since 1960. The state-level popularity data is only available for the top 100 names in each state so keep that in mind when your browsing around the state map. NameTrends also provides visual data that allows you to see similar names or variations of names over time.

According to NameTrends, the following names were also popular during the same time frame:

Randy

Brenda

Wendy

Brent

Those names which were popular and began with the same letter as mine include:

Jacob

Joshua

Joseph

James

Jayden

Looking at the state by state popularity map for my name, I discovered that in 1983 (the year I was born) the closest I came to being number 1 in the top 100 names was Connecticut and Massachusetts, both ranked at number 17.

Considering I have already been named, it is not going to do me much good but I find it interesting how my first name was popular in the 1940s to the 1980s and now it has started to die off. I wonder if that is because of the baby boomer generation finally beginning to level off or if my name simply isn’t popular to use anymore.

Dive into the site and report back with your findings related to your name. The data is confined to U.S. residents only.

Excellent news for all of you lucky enough to be able to use Woopra as your statistical analytics package. The Woopra Client is now up to version 1.1.2.1. This new version contains a number of bug fixes alongside some new features.

One of the reasons which might of taken this client update so long to be released is that, according to John P. the client update works hand in hand with the back end architecture of their servers. In other words, the client update comes out at the same time that their back end undergoes an update.

Three features which become immediately apparent are as follows:

The live map view now displays the page that a visitor is reading as they view it.

The calendar has been updated to a cool new extremely easy to select slider bar.

We’ve added multi-monitor support to the full screen live map.

Despite the new features and the bug fixes contained within this release, 1.1.2.1 is considered a minor release with a major version scheduled to be released within the next three weeks or so. Also worthy of mentioning is that all users who have been waiting to be approved should be approved by tomorrow evening. After the approvals, Woopra will have a testing base of over 20,000 users. That is 20,000 users which didn’t exist over 2 months ago.

The stats cover Jun 2005 all the way through April of 2008. Considering the success that Arrington has turned TechCrunch into, it’s very very interesting to see how it came about in a numerical sense. Judging by the Top Links which were compiled, TechCrunch has a good internal linking strategy going on with Crunchbase being the most linked to site within the posts of TechCrunch.

I also have to hand it to Mike and the crew he has had write for him. According to the numbers, Michael Arrington leads the way in terms of the number of comments left on the site. Duncan Riley who is no longer with TechCrunch came in at number 4. This means that even though there are hundreds of comments made on the blog, Arrington and his writers at least attempted to continue the conversation after the post is published, rather than letting it die off. I’ve always been told that large websites generally ignore commentators, but could TechCrunch be one of the exceptions?

Please let me know what your thoughts are on the stats provided. Did you find anything that was surprising to you?

If you have visited this blog anytime after May 2nd, 2008 you may have noticed a pop up appear on your screen similar to the one shown on the right. Now, you might think this is a popup, an advertisement, perhaps even a malicious piece of code being executed on your system. The good news is, its none of the above. This notification is an invitation sent from my Woopra client, to you, to try and initiate a conversation between webmaster and blog reader.

Woopra is a sweet new analytics tool that goes a few steps above and beyond the Google Analytic offerings. One of those is the ability to initiate a conversation with the people who are browsing your site. So here is how this works.

If you use the WordPress Woopra Plugin, Woopra will have the ability to automatically tag visitors to your website. In order for visitors to go from being an anonymous IP address to name and email address, visitors need to leave a comment on your blog. When visitors leave a comment on your blog, they have to submit their name, email address and URL. Once this information is submitted to the website, Woopra strips that information and tags it to that IP address. Now you might be wondering if this is a BIG BROTHER snooping over you type of scenario. The truth is, it’s not. When you leave a comment, you are submitting that information voluntarily to the website. This is how Woopra explains it:

Virtually every site on the Web tracks users via cookies. Until now the only sites that had the resources to analyze and act on the data were large companies like Google and Amazon. Woopra brings this power to the masses.

So, if you visit my website and you previously left a comment, the following screenshot shows you what I would see:

My name is Jeffro on my own blog and that is what I have used to write a comment or two on the website. Also within this window of information is the ability to look up my browsing history on the domain, manually tagging the visitor, all of the information related to my browser, ip address ect, email address and you’ll even see my gravatar. That’s right, Woopra has built in Gravatar support which is pretty nifty.

So when a user browses jeffro2pt0.com and I initiate a conversation with you, this is what it is supposed to look like:

Two way conversation between web master/visitor. Now, I’ve gotten many reports that when user’s have clicked on the popup to initiate the chat, it doesn’t work. I have no idea why this is. It could be related to firewall settings on your computer or could be that, it doesn’t work. The good news is, the Woopra team is going to be reworking the chatting feature of Woopra. They plan on redesigning the Woopra popup as someone mentioned it looked like spam and they also plan on implementing a feature where site visitors can initiate a chat session with the web master instead of vice versa only. I think that would be pretty darn cool if that became a reality. That would eliminate the need for the shoutbox and it would give you one more way of getting in direct contact with me.

I hope that this information doesn’t affect your mindset in terms of commenting on this blog. If you don’t want this information to be available to me, you can always delete your cookies from your PC which will make you anonymous to Woopra. The personal identifiable information presented to me within Woopra is for my eyes only. So rest assured, your user data won’t be strewn across the net.

This will officially be the last post of 2007. What a year it’s been for this particular blog. Jeffro2pt0 started in May 2007 and since then, has continued to grow by leaps and bounds. I wanted to take a moment and thank each and every one of you for making 2007 a hell of a year for the blog. All of you who have subscribed to the RSS feed, commented on the blog, participated in the discussions and helped me out along the way have really helped to make this blog a success. I couldn’t of done it without you and I look forward to what 2008 may bring.

To illustrate the kind of year this blog had, I’ve taken the following screenshot of my AWStats page for the year 2007.

Blog Stats

There are currently 401 posts and 820 comments, contained within 15 categories and 1,872 tags.

Spam

New Year Means New Design:

As you may have noticed, the blog now sports a new design. It’s not really a major redesign, it’s more like a reshuffling/reorganization of content. I’ve removed one of the sidebars and have opted for one, large sidebar. I’ve also installed an Archive plugin and have turned the Archives into it’s own seperate page so that I could free up more space within the sidebar. I’ve made the shoutbox wider, moved the MyBlogLog reader widget to the bottom left part of the site, replaced the Recent Forum Posts module at the top left corner of the site with the Last 5 Blog Posts module and in 2008, I will add in a tag cloud. I will be condensing all of the categories into tags and from now on, blog posts will be organized by tags instead of seperate categories. Last but not least, I have widened the content area of the site by about 30 or 40 more pixels.

I also realize that the blog looks horrible in IE7, again. I will work on this during the month of January but until then, please browse my blog using FireFox.

On the backend of things, I have uninstalled numerous plugins. Most notable is the SideBlog plugin. I’ll stick to Twitter for those types of posts. You might also be surprised that I have removed the SezWho comment rating system as well as the Cliqin widget. It’s not that I don’t believe in these services, its that they weren’t being used to their fullest extent on the blog. So instead of keeping the blog polluted with stuff thats not being used, I opted to get rid of those features completely.

If you are one of the bloggers that joined Cliq or displays the Cliqin widget because of me, you now have the option to keep it published or take it off your own blog.

One other thing worth mentioning. A loyal RSS Feed Subscriber notified me today that the HeaderEntry plugin which adds copyright information to the beginning of a post when it’s being scraped or read through a FeedReader was actually keeping him from seeing what any of my posts were about. My guess is, he has his FeedReader setup to display this blog’s feed as a summary and that summary was nothing more than a copyright spiel. So, I have removed the plugin. Please let me know if the Feed returns to normal for you and thanks Lee also known as LGR for pointing this out to me.

The Forum Is No More:

The forum which is powered by Vbulletin and cost me $85.00 has been taken offline. The forum simply has not worked out as well as I thought it would. It’s actually had a negative effect on the blog. The forum has separated the forum users, from the blog users. I’m running out of time trying to update the forum to keep content fresh and there hasent’t been too many new members signing up as late. Therefor, I am going to go back to using the blog as a forum and not worry about having a seperate entity for the forum until I become uber popular. I don’t see that happening anytime soon. All of the forum posts and user data will be backed up and saved onto my hard drive so nothing will be lost. If I have a change of heart, we’ll start right back where we left off.

In Closing:

Thank you for your support throughout the year of 2007. I hope you and yours truly have a successful and happy New Year. Only four more to go until 2012!

Flickr has introduced a new feature for PRO members. The new feature highlights various stats for your online photos. If you’re a pro member you can activate your stats now. The first round of stats will take at least 24 hours to process.

The stats show you how people arrive to your photos. There are stats available for people surfing on Flickr itself – where the referrer is flickr.com – and stats about people coming from other websites. Flickr will now be able to tell you the sorts of things people search for on search engines where your photos turn up, and tell you how many views your photos have in a week, or for all time.

The stats will display as far back as 28 days prior to the day of activation. As for the more technical details of the stats themselves, Flickr states:

We update stats once a day

Your own views of your own photos are not counted

We track views and referrers when a page on flickr.com is loaded. We are unable to count views of your photos on external sites (like your blog).

The “Search Engines” group of referrers counts traffic from most of the major search engines online, including Yahoo!, Google, AOL, MSN, Ask.com, and live.com

When reading search engine results, we are able to show what people searched for to find your content.

We don’t display links to individual Flickr members as referrers

For more information in regards to this new feature, check out the official Flickr Stats FAQ.